Today Ars Technica is joined by Dominic Cianciolo, story and voice over director at NetherRealm Studios, to answer your burning questions about the unsolved mysteries of the Mortal Kombat universe.
Thank you to r/MortalKombat on reddit and the Ars Technica community for providing questions!
Directed and Produced by Justin Wolfson Edited by Ron Douglas
- Hi, I'm Dominic Cianciolo.I'mthe story and voiceover ofthe director for NetherRealmStudios and I'm here today toanswer some unsolved mysteriesabout the mortal Kombatuniverse.First up Guillerme Rasked why didn't Kronikarestore Shinnok.
So Kronikadid not restore Shinnok becauseit was beyond her power doso, when Raiden decapitatedShinnok at the end of MortalKombat X, that act itself wasirreversible.
And it was thatact that tipped the balancebetween good and evil inthe mortal kombat universe,irrevocably towards good.- God has upset thebalance of his strength.- And because Chronicle nolonger could achieve her desiredbalance of good and evil betweenthe realms and moral kombatuniverse.
That's why shedecided to restart time and takeeverybody back to the beginningof reboot desk.
Keon H asksare Raiden Shao Kahn, and Argusthe same race of immortals?And as a followup also asks,what does it mean for Raidenand Fujin to be Demigods?Well, at this point in mortalKombat, Shao, Kahn Raiden andArgus are not the same typesof beings.
Shao Kahn they'reextremely powerful is neithera God.
More in a more Raidenand August are more similarhaving divine origin.
They'reboth being protectors thatrespect of realms. These are theterm Demigod for Raiden andFujin.
It's simply to note themas lesser gods and the eldergods.
Uh, we found that peoplewere getting confused as tosort of what layer they were on.And so we adopted that termin MK 11 to try to separate itand make it a little clearwhere they were.
Uh, this is notto indicate that they're anyless divine than the elder godsthemselves.
Dragos M.S asks,who does Nitara answer to?
Isthere a high ranking authorityamong the vampires?
Vampireselders?
And just what exactly is Nitara?Alright,so Nitara, we haven't seen inawhile hails from the realm ofawareness, which is where herrace of vampires are from.
Andcontrollers of internist isruled by a coven, which includesthe head of the realms, mostancient 12 families and thetower reports directly to that cover.So Tahseen H asks if Shao Kahnis a God and former protectorOutworld like in the originaltimeline.
Well, first forthose that aren't aware, theoriginal timeline we're talkingabout are all the games priorto the mortal Kombat reboot in2011, quickly known as MK 9among certain folks.
So that'swhen we began our narrativeand started things up again.
Sostarting in that mortal KombatShao Kahn is a little bitdifferent.
Shao Kahn is mortal.There was life span is solong.
That's the first roundwe're seeking feel like he is,he has great strength.
He canbuild incredible magic, but hewould not be considered aGod because he's not a divineorigin who created the soulstones that are deep inside theNetherrealm?
The soul stonesthat are in NetherRealm wasfirst created by the sorcererthat toiled for the elder godsBack in the most ancient times,the sorcerers were taskedwith building a network ofportals.
Where we connect all therealms together, but workingin the Netherrealms, sat theirpowers.
And as a result,they needed to build the soulstones to restore their energyas they worked in Netherrealm- Fatality!- So the Ars Technica editorswere asking, you know, lookingback on the series, whichare my favorite Fatalities,Babalities, friendships, andanimality?
So my favoritefatality is Johnny's deadlyuppercut from a more common,deadly upper- CutReset- Deadly Uppercut take two.- Actioncut.- Who hired this guy..- I love the amount of storytelling thatShannon Mira and ourfatalities team jam.
It issuch a small amount of time.Itwas gross.
It was funny,and it was just totally incharacter for Johnny cage andanother one from Tahseen H,Tahseen asks, where are theother elemental Gods?
So farwe've only seen Raiden andFujin so where do they go?
Arethey dead?
Or they're in theTemple of the Elements, asFujin says in one of his intros.So as Fujin said, the wiseDemigods, that he is the otherelement of God's continued toguard the temple of the elements.It's there, that they'rekeeping watch over varioussacred items that need to be keptaway from both mortals and aswell as other evildoers in themoral kombat universe.
Now,MarkT_D_W asks ,I need to askthe single most important hotlydebated unanswered questionin the history of theentire mortal combat series.And that is what the hellhappened in Fiji with JackieBriggs?
This is something that'sreferenced in a few of ourintro dialogues, and it's veryclear that, uh, Jackie had avery bad experience with Fiji,a humorous one, but a bad oneBut I have to say much ofwhat happened on Fujin remainsclassified.
What little weknow has been pieced togetherfrom materials that have broughtto light versus freedom ofinformation act, request it'san on the ground eyewitnesstestimony.- So what the heck happened in Fiji?- God, can we not do this?- What we do know is that theU.S government has a specialoperation to infiltrate ameeting, being held by aninternational terrorist groupshould have been simple, butthanks to a combination ofsketching, Intel pesty, innocentbystanders in a particularlyirate, a Guana, the wholemission went South.- You see builds about the Fiji mission.- Heard all about the umbrella drinks.- I'm going to kill him.- Animality.- My favorite Animality has tobe Katana's rabbit Animalityhands down.
I mean, how cananimality that references moneyPython all Holy grail not beyour favorite.
I mean, to methat just wins.- Can'tBanTheJan asks, So ifRaiden and Liu Kans coexistingtogether disturb Kronika'sdesired balance, why does shealways restart time with bothof them existing and beingallies?
Okay Kronika's hisultimate goal has been to createa timeline where good andevil are in perfect balance.She hasn't achieved that goalyet.
And some the scales havetipped too far towards goodand others they've tipped toofar.
It's toward evil in eachcase when the scales tip toofar in one direction, theother Kronika has rebooted thetimeline and started over.Now Raidens and Lui Kanscoexistence does not by itself,irrevocably tip the scale towards good.In fact, Kronika Caesar alliancesthat he means for good tostrongly balanced eitherand with each iteration of thetimeline, she's always tryingto strike a better balance.It's only in those timelineswere Raiden and Lie Kan hadcaused things to go too farexcited, good that they become aproblem.
And she's still tryingto just tweak it to get itexactly where she wants to be.Tahseen asks did the Titansbirth the other Elder Gods,similar to how Kronika birthCetrion and the fallen eldergod Shinnok?So of the elder gods onlyShinnok can set around were bornof Kronika and they're theonly two elder gods that wereborn at the Titans.Uh, Kronika births Shinnok andCetrion, and set around it soshe could have an inside manand an inside woman in place,as she was trying to achieveour mission of balancing goodand evil between the realms.Other than Kronika, theother Titans really have notinvolved himself directly inthe affairs of the realms.FuryofFrog asks, how manyKahns have there been?The exact number of outwardKahns unfortunately has beenlost to the pages of history,because outer world Kahnsusually forced their predecessorsout rather than peaceablysucceed them.And therefore the tendency hasbeen to bury the history ofprior regimes rather than celebrated.As a result, much of ourknowledge of how world history hasactually been lost.So Dragos M.S also asks howdid Chaosrealm come to be?Well before there were anyrealms at the beginning ofexistence, there was only theelder gods and the one beingthe one being fed off the eldergods and would have consumedthem at the elder gods,had not fought back.The elder gods defeated theone being and split the onebeing into pieces.
Those piecesbecame the realms, all therounds, including Chaosrealm.TavishDeGroot1 asks, did frostkill her mother intentionallyor accidentally?
Her dialoguecan be taken both ways.It's pretty clear that itwas intentional.
Frost had areally lousy home lifeand a lot of beasts.- Babality- My favorite Babality is KainosBabality from mortal kombatnine.
I love the fact that hisfacial cybernetic implant istoo heavy for baby canine andit causes them to fall over.
Imean, short of watching himlist to one side and then justfall over, cracks me up every time.Ars Technica also asks whichMK character has the happiesthome life?
Well, as weestablished a bit earlier frost,certainly,but if we're defininghappiest home life, as in thetraditional sense, as someplacethat's peaceful and pleasantand a place of refuge, I'dhave to go with Luke hat.I mean his life among theshell and is a great source ofpersonal strength for him.
Butif we're defining happy, homeis one that simply givesthe character pleasure.
I'dprobably have to go withKaino.
I mean, he revels in thecrazy to Bosch right there.- I'm doing this one for fun.- It's a life that most rationaltrained people reject, butit's certainly makes him happy.And another question fromFuryofFrog when regularhumans die, do they go to theNetherRealm or is thatonly for kombatants?So the NetherRealm and themortal Kombat universe is theplace where any creature whodies with an evil soul will gouh, it doesn't matter whetherthey're a combatant or justa regular Joe living somewhere,if you're evil, or if yoursoul is tainted with evil,when you die, you're going towind up in Netherrealm.You know, what is the origin of toasty?- Toasty,toasty- This happened well before Igot to the studio, but here'sbasically how it went down.Ed Boon and Dan Forden used toplay a lot of high impact andsuper high impact footballgames.
They both worked ontogether while working on MK1.As the players break thehuddle and approach the line.There's a brief opportunity toget in with a brag or a talkforeplay starts something, thelines of like, I'm going tobust you up or you're toast.Well, your toast turned into,I predict toes or somethinglike that.
And somehow thenit became, I predicted toastywith an operatic false setup, warmer.- Toasty- George Petro, another gamedesigner we're working withcommented that they shouldput it as some kind ofinstallations.
I joke and littlecombat didn't think anybodywas taking this seriously untilEd one day suggested that'dbe cool that if I'm 1% of alluppercuts an image of Dan'sface with slide on it,the screen and say toasty.- Oh, toasty- Dan agreed, and the rest is history.- Toasty.- Friendship!- My favorite friendships, Ireally wanted to split this upbetween old school and newschool because things changed somuch in terms of how we canpresent them and the amount ofthings we would just dump intothe, the friendships let's goaround and what a comment11 the old school, uh,friendships.
My favorite hasto be Kaball and is marshmallowtoasting.
I'm a big fan oftoasting marshmallows and thehuge one that he cooks on hishood sort.
It looks like Icould spend an entire eveningknowing on the darn things.Perfection.
It's just awesome.And mortal Kombat 11.
Myfavorite friendship has tobe, Raiden's a great way toupdate your original friendshipwith kid thunder.
And I'llspeak to me to that part,awesome life balance performance,uh, that we've seen a lot ofon the internet.
I mean, thatwas just fantastic thatthey could pull that off.It's something that's oftenbeen asked of us, whether aftermass confrontation, betweenRiaden and Lui Kan over whetheror not to trust Shane soon,which directly calls back to asimilar beat in mortal combatis DC universe is intended tomake those events of MK DCCanon.
And the answer is yes,definitely.
For sure.
Uh, wecan assume that those eventshappened in one of Kronika's,many previous timelines,clearly she thought it was amistake cause she rolled itback and got rid of it.But yeah, once we looked atthis idea of timelines andmultiple timelines, and wewere hoping to be able tointegrate a lot of, you know,the past lore, including MKDC.
And it was a lot of funfor us to be able to referencethat back.
And we knew thatour most observant fans andthose folks that have beenwith us through the whole, thewhole history of the game,we're going to pick up on thatand see that similarity.Another question we get at thestudio a lot is an aftermathprologue, where we hear thatFujin night Wolf and Shane songhave been trapped by Kronikain a void.
And that's wherethey've been during the eventsof the main game.
And thequestion comes up is here, isthis void new to mortal Kombatlow?
Well, actually it isn't,it's not something that's newvoid was first mentioned inscorpions by when MK deception.Uh, and that was somethingwe saw in like, Oh, you knowwhat?
We can totally bring thatback and use that for middlekombat 11.So one question we've gottenfrom folks who have perhaps notplayed all of the older mortalcombat games is about Fujinand Shiva.
If they played abig role in the mortal kombataftermath story and sort ofwhen were they first playable inthe history of moral combat,Shiva made her first playableappearance back in mortalkombat Sri Fujin made his firstplayable appearance backmortal Kombat 4, however, thatwasn't food, his first appearancein mortal Kombat lower.He first shows up as anopponent in mortal Kombatmythologies, subzero, subzerobattles his way through thetemple, on the elements.
Well,that's all the questions thatwe have time for.
I want tothank everyone who submitted aquestion and we wereoverwhelmed with the amount ofquestions.
We had a lot ofreally great questions, and ittook a lot of effort from alot of people to sift throughthem, pick the ones thatwe can answer today.Um, there were a lot of reallygreat questions about sort ofthe dark areas of the mortalKombat universe of laysunsolved mysteries that wouldhopefully solve you today.Uh, of course there are stillmany more that are left andhopefully we can come back atanother time and be able toanswer more questions for people.Uh, for those of you outthere whose names I might havemispronounced, I have toapologize for that.
I feel yourpain.
I have a hard to pronouncelast name, myself Cioncioloand it gets mispronouncedconstantly.
So I know what that'slike.
I did my best if I didn'tget it right, please feelfree to hit me on Twitter,correct.
My pronunciation.Um, that's it for now?
Uh,thanks again from all the folkshere in their own studios forjoining us.
And we hope to seeyou again soon.